Tweed (A Silo Story)
by Diego San Diego
Summary: FanFiction for the Wool series by Hugh Howey. This book is based on WJ Davies' FanFiction of Wool, so it's FanFiction of FanFiction. Imagine a world where everyone lives underground in silos but nobody knows why. This is a new category added to so please upload your own silo stories.
1. Chapter 1

Tweed

Lauren Hill had a migraine from the fluorescent lights hanging above her head, yet she continued writing on the classroom whiteboard anyway. If she kept her mind on the words she was writing, she could forget the aching stress in her head and neck. She never liked fluorescents because the light was too white and not natural like the daylight she'd seen at the up-top on the class field trip. She promised herself she'd make the long trek twenty floors back up there someday to get a glimpse of daylight, even if it was through video monitor.

She turned and looked at her room full of fifth grade students. They were copying her notes from the board onto their own whiteboards. The days of lined paper were long gone. These students would never hold a pen or pencil. Their writing instruments would always be erasable markers which saddened Lauren because everything these children would write down could be erased one day. Their thoughts, dreams and even their written memories were temporary like everything else here in the Silo 35.

"These are your spelling words for the week," Lauren said to the class. "Memorize them for your quiz on Friday. And remember, I want clean handwriting for the quiz and no smudges. "

She heard a groan from the back of the room and it was her class clown Alexander Toft, a boy who rarely sat still without making a grunt or a comment. "Alexander, you don't like writing your spelling words?" she asked.

She watched him blush at the unexpected attention. "When can we go back to keyboards?"

"They require electricity which is in short supply," Lauren said. "IT has rationed power and we're doing our part by using our markers and boards."

Paige Meyers raised her hand and Lauren noticed the green ink on the side of the girl's hand. She was a lefty and struggled with smearing her words as she wrote them.

"Yes Paige?"

"When are you leaving for the up-top?" she asked.

"What, you're leaving us?" another student called from the back of the room.

Lauren noticed the commotion and whispers among her students. There were rumors from up-top that something had happened outside the silo and security was on high alert. Families that commuted daily up and down the stairwells had noticed more than one sheriff rushing to the upper floors. And some had noticed medical personnel carrying supplies upward. Everyone had assumed that somebody had either committed suicide, which happened often in the silo, or that somebody had tried to escape out into the barren landscape, which would also be suicide.

Lauren was the only person in the entire school that knew truth behind the rumors. A sheriff had come to her apartment two nights ago to ask her questions and to get her advice about foreign languages. While she taught English to these fifth graders, she was capable of teaching so much more that wasn't in the silo curriculum. Her father and taught her how to speak Spanish and French as his father had taught him. She could even speak in sign language which made her unique among all the elementary school teachers. It was a family tradition to learn and memorize other languages even though the only language spoken in the silo was English. That's how she became involved in the news from above.

"I'll be gone only for a few days," Lauren said. "Principal Martin will be my substitute teacher. She'll administer your quiz on Friday."

She watched their frowning faces and heard the groans when Alexander raised his hand.

"Will that girl go to school here?" Alexander asked.

"What girl?" Lauren asked.

"The girl who knocked on the silo hatch. My Dad said she's nine years old," Alexander said.

The room was silent. Alexander knew more details than Lauren because his father worked in IT and probably had inside knowledge. Depending on his father's security clearance, he was either an insider or he hacked his way to the information. This made more sense to Lauren now. This person who found her way to the silo, must speak a foreign language and the silo security was pulling together a team of people to find out what language she spoke. The sheriff had withheld this detail from Lauren and he certainly never mentioned the silo visitor was a young girl.

"When will you come back? What day?" Paige asked.

Lauren thought about her long journey to the up-top and what she might find if the rumor was true. If a nine year old girl had walked to silo 18 on her own, then there's no telling how long IT and Security would need her assistance. She felt a draft in the air and buttoned her tweed jacket.

"I'm not sure, Paige but I could be gone for quite a long time."

Lauren's climb up those twenty flights began at six the next morning. She'd received a late evening call from the sheriff's deputy, Judith Clark, who apologized for the late notice but insisted that Lauren be packed and ready to go by six. Judith instructed her to pack only bare essentials into a backpack for the Porter to carry to the up-top. Lauren was stuffing her pack one more time, trying to fit in her running shoes. She assumed they'd have a gym at the up-top, a place where she could run on a treadmill to burn off stress or maybe a quiet room for yoga. She was only twenty-five years old, not out of shape like many of the other teachers and educators at her school, but she planned to keep it that way. She decided she might as well wear the running shoes since the climb would take most of the morning.

She heard a knock and grabbed her pack and carried it to the door. It was heavy and she wondered if it might be too heavy for the trip up the silo. She opened the door and greeted a small, petite middle age woman in a uniform. She had a sheriff's hat and large black belt the hugged her hips with a gun on her left side.

"Lauren? I'm Deputy Clark," she said. "And this here is your Porter, Derek Green."

Derek stepped into view from the door frame and smiled with a nod. He wasn't even six feet tall but he was muscular, like a wrestler. His t-shirt was tight across his chest. He looked no older than twenty.

"Good morning! Is everyone ready for a workout?" he asked.

"I've got my running shoes," Lauren said, handing him her pack. "I apologize for how heavy this is."

Derek tossed it over his shoulder. "Whoa, we won't be running flights of stairs today," he said.

"Go ahead of us, Derek. We won't slow you down," Deputy Clark said.

Lauren watched Derek jog down the hallway with his rubber shoes squeaking along the way. Porters had special soles on their shoes to ensure they never slipped while carrying gear up and down the silo staircase. You could often hear them coming long before you ever saw them and Lauren took comfort in the fact that her personal belongings were safe in a Porter's hands.

"Ready?" Deputy Clark asked.

Lauren looked back into her efficiency apartment at her tattered couch and her stack of romance novels, relics passed down from generations of family members, stuffed into a small bookshelf. She had already left a note for her father on the refrigerator with instructions written in French. This was a game she played with him, leaving notes in foreign languages to challenge each other to remember how to read and speak in anything other than English. It was also how she engaged with her aging father who lived with Parkinson's disease. It was a way to keep his mind sharp. Her instructions were simple, to water her plants every other day. All the glow lights were set on timers and she hoped the rolling power outages wouldn't break the timers.

"I'm ready," she said, adjusting her backpack. "How long will this take to get to the up-top?"

"We'll beat some of the morning traffic," Deputy Clark said as she began walking. "And the higher we climb the fewer people we'll run into but by then our legs will be tired. So I'd say we can do it in two hours. The Porter will be there in one."

The silo was a different place in the early morning hours. There was no hum of activity or laughter that she'd often heard before school started each morning. The echoes in the silo were more haunting and lonely in the early hours. With each step, Lauren heard her own feet sliding across metal and Deputy Clark's wheezing as they climbed. Lauren thought about her young students and how they would act while she was away on this most unusual assignment. Would they miss her as much as she would miss them?

She thought about her student Alexander's comment in class. She assumed Deputy Clark might know but Lauren tried a more indirect approach. She asked her about the other events that had the silo citizens in a stir.

"How about the recent cleaning, huh?" she asked.

Deputy Clark gave a large sigh. "Yeah a man released from the silo to clean the sensors and he didn't finish the job. He spent most of his time staring at another body of his friend."

"He had a friend who went to the cleaning?" Lauren asked.

"Friend, yeah but more like a lover," Deputy Clark said. "Mick went to the cleaning five years ago and Ace was never the same. That's what I heard."

This was a detail Lauren hadn't heard since the incident happened nearly three months ago. All she knew was there a cleaning and then another cleaning and the second event was more dramatic than the first. The man named Ace and inscribed in his own blood onto his chest, "Help Us..." before he died. The IT department had recorded the event on camera and some people as the up-top had witnessed it live but everyone else on the mid-levels and lower levels had only learned about it through word of mouth.

To learn now that these men weren't only friends but lovers only made Lauren feel more pain for them both. This was like that Romeo and Juliet story book that her grandmother had passed onto her from her grandmother. It was about how true love rose above family lines and how one could not live without his or her lover.

"That's tragic," Lauren said. "I can't imagine—"

"You don't know the half of it," Deputy Clark said. "We got a body out there with a bloody message across its chest. It's a frightening reminder that this place can be a living hell. We're all trapped in here."

This was Lauren's opportunity to learn more about the most recent news from up-top. "But there's hope. Somebody from the outside has made into silo."

Deputy Clark climbed two more stairs and paused at the landing and turned to look down at Lauren. "Who told you that?"

Lauren felt cornered and she wasn't about to give away her student Alexander. "I, uh it's only a rumor. I assume you know about it."

"I have instructions from the Mayor and the Sheriff to escort you to the up-top but I'm not supposed to talk about why you're needed up there," Deputy Clark said. "Got it?"

Lauren climbed the rest of the steps to the landing as Porter came rushing by them. "Yes, I got it," she said.


	2. Chapter 2: The Diner

After an hour, Lauren's quads burned with each step and she continually dodged people bounding up and down the stairs. She checked her watch and it was just after seven in the morning and the silo was busy with foot traffic. Officer workers and students were commuting up and down as Lauren and Deputy Clark climbed higher and higher through the pedestrian traffic.

"We'll pull over soon," Deputy Clark said, with a wheezing breath. "There's a nice diner on level forty. We can rest and have a bit of breakfast."

Lauren grabbed the rail as she climbed. "That sounds terrific to me. I've only climbed to the up-top a few times in my life and it was usually when I was young enough that my father carried me at least part of the way."

"Most people who live below the mid-level rarely make it up this far. And the majority of people who live in the lowers never make this far," Deputy Clark said. "Why would your father bring you to the up-top?"

"He wanted me to see what daylight looked like and the stars at night," Lauren said. "He wanted me to know that there's a world out there, outside the silo."

"There _was_ a world out there a long time ago but not anymore."

"Oh I realize that now but when I was a young girl I had hoped that the world he showed me was one that I could see and experience when I became an adult," Lauren said. "I had always thought life in the silo was temporary and that we'd all leave one day. We were just waiting for the outside world to heal itself and then we'd go outside. I have picture books handed down through my family and there are drawings of children climbing trees, not climbing stairwells. I've always wanted to climb a tree."

"Well the world hasn't healed itself enough for anybody to survive out there climbing trees, at least not without special clothing," Deputy Clark said with a breathy laugh. "You have kids of your own?"

"No, I'm single and no children," Lauren said. "I have twenty children in my classroom who I love as if they're my own, but I'm not their mother," Lauren said, thinking about her dating life and how she wished she could find a husband, somebody to come home to each night. Her long school days and her evenings helping her aging father were to blame for her single life, at least that's what she told herself time and again.

"I have twin teenage boys who drive me and my husband to madness sometimes," Deputy Clark said. "We had children later in life and it's all we can do to keep up with them at our age."

"If you ever need a sitter to watch the boys so you and your husband can get away for the weekend, I'd be happy to do it," Lauren said.

"Really? Now that's an idea. I've always wanted to try that spa down on level twenty," Deputy Clark said. "I'll keep that in mind, thank you for offering, Lauren."

"I like kids, they inspire me," Lauren said.

Deputy Clark slowed her pace as she reached a landing and stepped aside as a Porter ran by along with two girls in uniform heading down to school.

"We'll pull over here and rest for a bit," Deputy Clark said.

Lauren stood on the landing and on the wall in front of her was a large faded number "Forty" that had been painted a long time ago. To her left and right were hallways that led deeper into the silo and they looked exactly the same as the hallways on her level, except the people here dressed better. The people living on level forty seemed to be white collar workers and clerical assistants. None of them wore coveralls or denim, nobody had grease-splattered clothing that Lauren had seen in the lowers. Life near the top was less physical and she assumed more mental and more creative. Maybe this is why her father brought her up here when she was young. Maybe he wanted her to see how others lived to know that there's a better way to live and that she too could be upwardly mobile one day.

"Ready for some coffee?" Deputy Clark asked.

"Ready when you are," Lauren said, rubbing her sore legs.

She followed Deputy Clark down a hallway that turned into another hallway where they passed a Deputy's Station, a Post Office, a small convenience store and finally they reached what looked like a diner and smelled like coffee. Deputy Clark waved at waitress as they walked in and sat at booth.

"I get free coffee here and you will too," Deputy Clark said. "You got diners like this on your level?"

"Yes, very similar," Lauren said, as she surveyed the diner. "None that have coffee that smells as good, though."

Deputy Clark smiled. "No kidding, the higher you go the fresher the coffee beans," Deputy Clark said.

The waitress walked over with her hands in her apron. "What can I get you two ladies?"

"The usual for me," Deputy Clark said.

Lauren grabbed the menu off the table and scanned it quickly. "Coffee and French toast, please?"

"Easy enough, I'll be back in a minute with your coffees," the waitress said.

Lauren watched her walk back to the espresso machine and she admired how her uniform was clean and not soiled like most of the wait staff on her level. Everything here was cleaner, and more contemporary than the lowers.

"I want to apologize for barking at you when we were climbing," Deputy Clark said in a whisper. "When you started asking me about the person who entered the silo, I knew I couldn't talk about it in the stairwell. The sound carries up and down the silo and there are a lot of curious people listening for any piece of news."

"I totally understand. You have specific security clearance that I don't have," Lauren said. "It makes sense that you can't talk about it."

"But I want to talk about it," Deputy Clark said, looking around the diner. "I need to talk about it with somebody. I can't tell my husband or my kids because they're sure to blab it to somebody and get us all in trouble. But since you've been called to the up-top to help with the situation, you're going to know soon enough, so I could talk with you about it, right? As long as we're not climbing where someone will hear us."

"If you're comfortable telling me what you know," Lauren said. "I'd appreciate hearing it because nobody has told me much about why I'm needed up-top."

"Ok, here it goes – so after the last cleaning when Ace didn't really clean the sensors but he flipped out and killed himself, well that got everyone nervous," Deputy Clark said. "Because suicides in the stairwells are common but nobody had up until that point committed suicide outside, on camera."

"It's a horrible thing I know –"

"Suicides are contagious, asking any psychologist. And Security and IT got all nervous that others sent to the cleaning would copycat what Ace did and no longer clean the sensors," Deputy Clark said.

The waitress brought the coffees and set them down on the table. "Your breakfast will be up shortly."

"I understand why they would be nervous about this but what does it have to do with the rumor that somebody from the outside has come into the silo?" Lauren asked.

"In all the drama watching Ace, the Security crew that let him out, didn't follow the normal procedure to secure the silo. They accidentally left the hatch open," Deputy Clark said.

"I thought they burned everything in the hatch as soon as somebody went outside," Lauren said. "To make sure they burned off any toxic gas."

"That's correct. The flames burn off toxic gas and the fear of burning to death is what gets cleaners to actually go outside. But the flames are also used for another purpose," Deputy Clark said.

"What other purpose?"

"To prevent anybody from another silo from entering silo 35," Deputy Clark said. "It's a defense mechanism."

Lauren was sipping her coffee and swallowed so hard she burned her throat. "What? Are people trying to get in to our silo?"

"Yes and when they discovered somebody in the hatch they were about to torch the person until they realized the person was so small," Deputy Clark said. "The intruder was a child!"

"My god, they didn't burn the child!" Lauren said in a loud whisper.

"Shhh, no they let her in and decontaminated her suit with chemicals," Deputy Clark said.

"So the child is a girl? Where did she come from, what did she say?" Lauren asked.

Deputy Clark stirred her coffee with a spoon. "Nobody knows what she's saying. She speaks a foreign language and that's why they've summoned you."

Lauren's mind was reeling think about this poor young girl walking through the wilderness in a protective suit only to be nearly torched to death. Had another silo sent her out for a cleaning? Who would do such a thing? What crime could a child commit to warrant that kind of punishment? What language does she speak?


End file.
